ProMat 2015, slated to be held March 23-26, will feature more than 800 exhibits and include a comprehensive educational conference. The event, held at the McCormick Place South, will offer an array of products to increase productivity in your operations. Here’s a guide to many of them.

In today's supply chain, the only constant is change.
Our white paper 'Change Your Perspective: Four Keys to Effectively Adapting to Rapid Change in the Distribution Center Environment' provides key insights on not only adapting to trends, but which trends will enable you to achieve running the warehouse of the future.

During this Webcast you'll learn how the latest generation of robotics systems, which incorporate vision, mobility, autonomous navigation, complex manipulation and motion control, can be used in a wide variety of appliations such as picking, placing, order fulfillment, palletizing, depalletizing, loading, unloading and many other areas.

Anyone who has followed the evolution of materials handling equipment understands that automatic guided vehicles are certainly not the new kids on the block. They first hit the floor more than 60 years ago under the name “driverless vehicle,” and thus began the long and arduous process of winning the respect of manufacturing and distribution managers looking to apply lean processes to improve productivity.

During those early years they were expensive (more than $100,000 per unit), could only take one fixed path using wires, they’re weren’t very smart, and the sheer size of their batteries relegated them to mostly simple tasks like towing carts back and forth between pre-assigned locations.

But as time marched on, AGV suppliers knew that they needed to design and upgrade the functionality to mimic the operational abilities of a human being—since the original idea was to relieve humans from the tedium of moving materials from point A to point B so they could concentrate on more value-added tasks. And by all of our reports, those suppliers have succeed.

As contributing editor Maida Napolitano reported last month in her article “Seven fresh ways to think about AGVs,” over the past 10 years, AGV suppliers, with the help of development partners and the input of end users, have greatly decreased battery size while improving energy output and upgrading circuit boards. They have also applied traffic management software and sensors to make the equipment smarter, more reliable, and much less expensive.

We’re now beginning to seen entire manufacturing operations being revolutionized by the application of AGVs and their first cousins, including automatic guided carts (AGCs), automatic guided tuggers (AGTs), and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that use lasers and vision systems to learn the layout of your facility free of any fixed path.

In fact, just a few months ago, executive editor Bob Trebilcock took us inside John Deere’s 5.9-million-square-foot manufacturing facility in Waterloo, Iowa, where the company has applied 35 AGVs to create a flexible, mobile assembly line that created a safer working environment and improved quality.

This month, Trebilcock takes us inside the Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky (TMMK) facility to get a glimpse at one of the most innovative applications of AGVs we’ve seen to date. Over the past six years, Paul Stafford, the facility’s AGV implementation engineering lead, has rolled out more than 100 AGVs to transport raw metal parts and finished subassembly components through its 7.5-million-square-foot assembly plant in Georgetown.

But the most intriguing part of TMMK’s story is that its now putting five different types of AGVs—including man-operated tuggers that were converted to AGTs—to work, resulting in a huge boost to productivity, millions in savings, and allowing 42 staff members to move into more value-added positions.

“On top of the labor management piece of this story, what impressed me most was the way that TMMK brought together several different kinds of AGV technologies to address their materials handling needs,” says Trebilcock. “What’s more, the conversion of conventional, man-operated tuggers into automatic vehicles makes this facility truly unique.”

About the Author

Michael LevansGroup Editorial Director

Michael Levans is Group Editorial Director of Peerless Media’s Supply Chain Group of publications and websites including Logistics Management, Supply Chain Management Review, Modern Materials Handling, and Material Handling Product News. He’s a 27-year publishing veteran who started out at the Pittsburgh Press as a business reporter and has spent the last 20 years in the business-to-business press. He’s been covering the logistics and supply chain markets for the past 11 years. You can reach him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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Find out what the world’s most innovative companies are doing to improve productivity in their plants and distribution centers.

In today's supply chain, the only constant is change.
Our white paper 'Change Your Perspective: Four Keys to Effectively Adapting to Rapid Change in the Distribution Center Environment' provides key insights on not only adapting to trends, but which trends will enable you to achieve running the warehouse of the future.